The Beginning and The End
by Exceeds Expectations
Summary: "Lilies are my favourite," she says, and Draco squeezes her hand. She doesn't know that they are already dead, and he doesn't have the heart to tell her. /AU, disability!fic, blind!Ginny. For Ali.


**A/N:** For my darling wifey Ali. I tried to finish in time for your birthday, but you know me; when have I ever finished anything on time? Nevertheless, I love you, and I hope you love this.

* * *

**"I love her, and that's the beginning and end of everything."― F. Scott Fitzgerald.  
**

* * *

When he finally gets up the courage to visit, her small hospital room has more flowers than all the gardens of the Manor. It smells too much like home. He hates it.

"Who is it?" she calls, and he finds he doesn't want to tell her, doesn't want to have to force his name out between his teeth and see the hatred twist her freckled face worse than his curse did.

But she turns towards him, eyes empty and staring, the deep brown of her eyes bleached a pale shade of nothing. The curse has left scars like twisted vines, all blackened edges knotting their way up the side of her pale face. He wonders what it would feel like to run his fingers across the damage. Like touching tragedy with his bare hands, he supposes.

She blinks and she waits and she says, "Who is it?" once more. She breathes too quietly, he thinks, doesn't move enough. She seems almost dead. He wonders if it is an echo of how she feels.

"Malfoy," he breathes finally, when her patience looks set to slip away, "It's Draco."

There is a silence that weighs on them both, a silence in which he stares and he supposes she listens, listens to the shallow edge of his breath or the crooked beat of his heart, maybe even the twitch of his fingers or the way his teeth worry at his lip. Lose one sense, the others are heightened, right?

"Oh." She sounds breathless. Doesn't seem angry, just surprised. Not hateful, just confused. "Why?"

Draco blinks slowly, wondering if, when the darkness fades, she won't look like a victim anymore. It doesn't suit her. "W – why what?"

She lets the silence linger again, and Draco tries to stare anywhere but at those unseeing eyes or that twisted face. He focuses instead on the rosebud of her lips, the petal pale blush of her cheeks, the fire of her hair as it streams over her shoulder; she is a flaming flower and she always was so, so beautiful.

And Draco watches her lips shape the words, knows what she is going to ask even before she does, but still he has no answer.

"Why everything?"

"I don't know. But I'm – I really am sorry."

She smiles then, the right side of her mouth quirking higher, the left pushing up black-vine scars, and Draco thinks she is still very pretty in the most frightening way.

"No need to be sorry," she says. "You didn't mean for this to happen. You were always too much of a spineless coward to do any real damage."

She smiles again when he laughs, and then the silence settles once more, thick as the dust on their centuries-old blood-feud. They are both scared to disturb it. But she is Ginny Weasley, and she is strong and brave and so much more than he is, and she says, "Sit down," and gestures to the armchair next to her bed, and when he does, she reaches for his hand.

"It makes it less scary," she says, leaving all of her false confidence and bravado at his feet, "if I can feel you. So I know you're actually here."

Draco swallows. "I see."

"I don't."

And he feels bad for laughing, but she's laughing too, and it might be the sweetest thing he's ever heard, so he tries to forget to feel guilty. It doesn't work.

"How have you been?" he asks, the words clanging awkwardly in the space between them. Niceties and inane questions have no place in the aftermath of a war, he muses. And yet here they are.

He looks around at the flowers as she speaks, at all the faded colours and all the fallen leaves, and she tells him about her brothers and how scared they are, and how her mother can't grieve properly because she's thinks she has to pretend everything's okay, and that the lilies by the window are from Harry's funeral and did he know that Harry didn't blame him?

Draco drops his gaze to the floor. The flowers hold too many broken hearts on their dull leaves and her face holds far too much sadness. "They're beautiful though, aren't they?" she says softly,

"Yeah," he says, and looks to their clasped hands. The scent of the flowers is far too overpowering. He is starting to feel sick.

"Lilies are my favourite," she says, and Draco squeezes her hand.

She doesn't know that they are already dead, and he doesn't have the heart to tell her.

* * *

As he is leaving, he turns back and she is sitting up in her bed, caressing her own hands. He wonders if she is making sure she is still real.

"Thank you," he whispers oh so quietly, but he knows she hears him.

* * *

He goes back again less than two weeks later and he doesn't know why. He has given her his (_worthless, useless, pointless_) apology, expressed his concern, and yet...

She is sitting in the chair by the bed this time. She has the head of a rose laid flat in the palm of her hand, and Draco watches from the doorway as she peels back the petals, strokes each with a light finger and a heavy heart.

"So much is wilting," she says quietly, voice thick. "Don't you think?"

She turns to look at him, fixing those empty eyes where he stands.

"I don't know," he says, because he doesn't.

"Autumn is my favourite season," she says, and smiles that sunbeam smile at him, and it wouldn't hurt so much if it weren't stained with pain and sadness and self-pity. "There was always something beautiful about death. Watching the leaves die. The trees. So much colour, you know?"

He doesn't, again, has no idea what to say, so instead he walks closer. She follows him with her blind gaze, head twitching with every echoing step he takes. He sits on the edge of the bed, feels out of place, feels wrong, but reaches for her hand anyway.

She squeezes his fingers in thanks.

"I think the best part about watching everything die," she says, "is knowing that it was all so alive once."

"Spring," he says, "It's spring."

She smiles sadly, traces circles into the palm of his hand with her small fingers. "Not for people, Draco," she says. "There is no spring for us."

* * *

His mother asks him why he visits the Weasley girl.

"The war is over, Draco," she says. She is weary and weak, her body frail and thin, shoulders shrouded with the shadow of loneliness, of betrayal. He wonders how hard it is for her to sleep in an empty bed after so many years with his father. "Can't you just let it go?"

"No."

That night, he changes the bandages on her wounds. He applies the salve to the burns on her back. He helps her dress for bed, winces as she cries out in pain against the scrape of the bedsheets, and kisses her goodnight.

"Draco, my son," she whispers to the darkness, "Let the girl go. She will never really love you. How could she?"

"Goodnight, Mother," he says, and shuts the door with the kind of resigned hopelessness with which one might shut a bible after years of waiting for a miracle. "Sleep well."

She doesn't, of course, and he falls asleep to the sound of her muffled sobs again.

* * *

The next time he visits, she is perched on the edge of the bed, her back to the door.

He knocks gently. "Ginny?"

"Draco," she says, and the sweet excitement in her voice still seems strange and mismatched. But so much has changed, he supposes. So much is different. She turns back to look over her shoulder, and all Draco can see is the scarred side of her face, all twisted roots buried deep into the earth of her skin, but the blackened edges have begun to fade, drifting into an angry red. He wonders if this means his curse is leaving.

"I brought you something," he says, and goes to settle beside her on the bed. He feels the heat of her along his thigh. "Here."

He holds the bouquet out to her, waits as she traces the path of his arm until she reaches the crinkled plastic, the long stems. He watches her fingers as the stroke the soft petals, fondle the bright leaves. She pinches them with her nails, leaves tiny slits along the ridges of the leaves, and says, "Lilies. You shouldn't have."

"I miss the smell," he says, and stares around at the now flowerless room. "And I thought you might, too."

"If I didn't know any better, Malfoy," she smirks, "I'd think you were trying to woo me."

He scoffs. "Please, Weasley. Not everyone is completely mad about you, you know."

She chuckles softly, hands still clasped around the stem of the lilies. If Draco stares for long enough, she could be a ghost, a little girl fallen into the safety of a coffin, a tragedy even greater than the one they're already living.

"Do you feel guilty?" she asks suddenly. "Is that why you keep coming back?"

"It's why I came at first," he says, feeling uncertain. "But now... Now I think I come because I know you want me to."

She snorts, slaps his thigh. "Shove off, Malfoy."

Silence settles around them as it always does, but it is less now to do with unspoken fears and age old feuds and more to do with easy comfort. They can hear birds in the distance.

"Is it really spring already?"

"Yes."

"How long has it been since – the end?"

"Ten months."

Ginny sucks in a breath, mouth rounded. "That's – that's a long time."

"I know," Draco says, and muses on how such a long time seems to have disappeared in the blink of an eye.

"Did you – were you at the funerals?"

He looks at her, at the hollow of her empty eyes, at the way her lip shakes when she speaks. He has never been sorrier.

"Yes."

"Was it nice? Did they – was it nice?" she asks lamely, and Draco sees the desperation in her movements, the way she fidgets with the flowers, the way her knee begins to shake.

"It was beautiful," he says quietly. "Potter's – _Harry's _– was...well. They mentioned you. Said he loved you until the end. Your mother put a jumper in his coffin."

"I thought she might," Ginny says, smiling sadly. Draco wonders if she can even cry, or if his curse took that from her too. "Fred's? How was Fred's? Mum won't – they don't like when I talk about it. Think I'm too fragile or something."

Draco hesitates, if only because he is half afraid that is voice will be too strained, too strangled when he speaks. "Your brother – the twin... I've never seen someone look so lost."

"I know," Ginny murmurs. "I can feel it. When he's here. He seems so _empty. _I never know how to act around him anymore. He's not the same."

"None of us are the same."

Her hand finds his, and Draco can smell the scent of the lilies as it wafts in the air, clinging to her skin. "No," she says. "I don't think so."

And then: "Take me outside."

"Sorry?"

"I want to feel the sun. Please, Draco."

"Don't your family – "

"They think I'm so much worse off than I am," she says. "I'm blind. I'm not a child, not a bed-ridden old woman, not a lost little girl." She sighs, shoulders slumping, and Draco thinks that if none of this had happened, she'd be lounging in the sun, teaching her family how to smile again.

And this is his fault.

"Alright," he says finally. "Okay."

And he does.

* * *

He dreams about her sometimes.

He dreams that he finds her in the strangest places – _the garden at the Manor, the boy's dormitory, the kitchens, Borgin and Burkes _– and she is always startlingly pretty and beautifully angry, and she drags her nails down his back as she screams.

Sometimes she is behind him, the past that he cannot shake, that mistake he cannot escape, tearing into his skin and into his chest with her clawed hands, telling him everything he never wants to hear, never wants to believe. _You fucking coward. Your fault, it's all your fault. We hate you. I hate you._

And sometimes, and much more frighteningly, she is beneath him, with her legs wrapped around his waist and her pale skin shining in the moonlight, and he is thrusting and she is moaning his name, her empty eyes closed, and he is kissing the scars on her face and whispering _I'm sorry I'm sorry _and her nails are still scraping, and she's still tearing into his chest but in a very different way, and sometimes she even says _I love you. _

Sometimes he even says it back.

He always wakes sweating, tearing at the sheets. His mother never calls to ask what's wrong.

* * *

They sit on a rusted bench that creaks beneath them. Ginny's hospital gown blows around her knees, and she looks paler than ever in the bright sunlight.

"Well?" he asks, twining his fingers into hers, marvelling at how easy this feels.

"Well what?"

"How does it feel?" he says. "It's been a long time since you were in the sun."

"It feels like the bloody sun, you git," she says, but she's smiling her crooked smile. Her scars glint in the light, silver and pink, and Draco wants to trace them gently, from jaw to hairline.

"I really am sorry, you know," he whispers, and his voice scratches at this throat almost violently. "I never meant – I would never – I feel so fucking – "

"Draco," she says sharply, "I know. I know. It doesn't matter anymore."

"Doesn't matter? I fucking _blinded you_, I – "

"Stop." And her fingernails are digging into the back of his hand, her breath coming rapidly. "Stop it. I forgive you, alright? Now it's time to move the bloody hell on. It's done. It's all done."

And, this time, when the silence falls it sounds like regret.

"For what it's worth, I'm sorry about your father," she says eventually, her thumb running over the nail marks in his skin.

"Don't be," he says. "No one else is."

"How is your mother?"

"Bad," he sighs, and then he is telling her everything, about the Room catching fire and the burns and his father saving himself and how is mother collapsed long before the flames started to melt the flesh from her body and if it weren't for Charlie bloody Weasley she'd be _dead, _and that's _another _thing he owes her, owes her family, and does she know that he had about as much say in his side of the war as she did, that he was raised for this, that he never had a chance?

"I chose my side," she says. "And I chose well."

"No, you didn't," Draco says. "Your parents chose for you and you listened. So did I. The difference is your parents wanted equality and mine wanted power."

"I chose," she says again. "When I was twelve years old, Tom Riddle was my best friend and I chose my side, Malfoy."

"Sorry? Riddle – "

"Another time," she says, and drops her head so that it rests on his shoulder. "I'll tell you another time. Now tell me what you see."

He looks at the hospital grounds around them, at the crumbling buildings and the overgrown bushes and the falling street signs, at the cigarette butts and chewing gum that litter the path.

"There's a rose bush over by the gate," he says slowly. "Lots of bright flowers; I think I see some pink lilies in the corner. Not as pretty as the white, are they? And there's a magnolia tree, I can see it from all the way behind the other building, must be years old. And the _gardenias, _Merlin, can you smell them?"

"Yeah," she smiles. "Gorgeous."

"Yeah, they are. All of it is. And the sky is so blue, not a cloud in sight – still, I'm willing to bet it rains before the night's out..."

And it doesn't even feel like lying.

* * *

His mother reads paperback after paperback and hardly ever speaks. She sits in the chair by the fire that is never lit.

"I'll be back soon," he says.

She never says goodbye.

* * *

Two months later, the healers tell Ginny Weasley she is well enough to go home.

Draco is not there – she tells him when she's already left, sends a letter that night, a letter that says, _I'm home. I miss you, _and absolutely nothing else. But he knows.

He wonders how she wrote it – an enchanted quill perhaps, surely she didn't ask one of her brothers? – and if he should write back. Is there any way she could read it? He decides to try, spends almost two hours writing and rewriting and tearing up parchment before he settles on, _I miss you, too. When can I see you?_

He ties it to her owl's leg, that fidgety, flighty little shit, and says, "Don't give this to anyone but Ginny, okay?"

The owl hoots, hops away, and pretty much falls out the open window. Draco watches it hover and swerve and find its way until it is a dot on the horizon and the night air is too cold to stand. He closes the window and goes downstairs to close his mother's book and put her to bed.

She has stopped saying goodnight, prefers instead to blink up at him as he redresses her wounds. He kisses her goodnight and she does not kiss back; just stares.

Draco does not know why – or maybe he just doesn't want to.

* * *

She doesn't write back for weeks.

In that time, Narcissa goes through over two hundred books, piling them around her chair like a fortress. Most days, Draco has to remind her to eat.

The silence rings through his ears. He spends days on end walking through the Manor's gardens and naming the flowers; tulips, chrysanthemums, lilies...

And not the white ones, the pink ones, garish and bright and not nearly as elegant, not nearly as beautiful as –

He thinks of her entirely too often.

* * *

There is a bite in the wind on the day he finds his mother dead. It is cold and aches in his bones the way the war used to, echoing around the hollow of his chest like the toll of a bell that has long since stilled.

He wonders if she felt the same way. She is still surrounding by her turrets of novels, still guarded in the land of make believe, in worlds that don't exist and tragedies that pale in comparison to this life, to right now, to them. She looks peaceful, he thinks, fallen into a deeper sleep than she has had in weeks, months. Tonight, she will not cry herself to sleep and wake desperately to the morning light, clutching at the sheets and begging the flames to leave her be; perhaps this is how she wanted to be. He doesn't have it in him to hate her.

When the healer tells him it was poison, he pretends he is surprised. When he is back home, footsteps ringing in the empty corridors of his lonely home, a part of him wonders if he knew it was coming, if he turned a blind eye on purpose.

He wonders if she thought of him before she swallowed her own end, drinking sweet death greedily. Wonders what her last words were _I'm sorry _or _Draco _or _Lucius_ or if she still refused to speak, if the last thing she ever said was a _goodnight _from long ago.

"Goodnight," he whispers to the darkness, and shuts her bedroom door for the last time.

* * *

Her funeral is well attended – of course it is, she was Narcissa Black, Narcissa _Malfoy, _and she deserves recognition even in death. But she was sweeter than that, softer than the blade of her surname. Draco knows this.

He eulogises her. He doesn't look up as he does, can't bring himself to face the crowd of pitying eyes, or hatred-stained grimaces; there aren't many who look favourably upon him, even now. His voice limps into the silence dully, tiredly, and when he says goodbye it feels like turning the final page on a novel he never wanted to read, never wanted to _end._

He is sorry, he thinks, but does not say. He is sorry that it came to this, but he knows there never was another ending for their family; they were never going to end in anything but flames.

* * *

She finds him afterwards, caught in a throng of mourners who care more about appearing respectful than actually paying their respects, and Draco hates each and every one of them.

But then she is there, her arms wrapped around the sweetest smelling white lilies, pale as the moon, as her milky eyes, as the once-black scar that mars her face. She is beautiful, and she is smiling sadly, and she walks through the crowd on her father's arm and stops before him, silent and waiting.

"Hello," he says, because he does not know anything else that would fit this silence that doesn't taste like _I missed you _and sound an awful lot like _I love you._

"I'm sorry about your mother," she says, and he father has slipped away from her somehow, left her standing before Draco with the lilies in her arm and this awkward _what now _that lingers between them.

"For you," she says, and shrugs her arms just so. He steps closer slowly to take them from her, and each step brings a fresh wave of lilies and Ginny and then he is closer to her than he has been in so, so long and she has never been more beautiful.

"I can feel you staring," she says quietly, lips quirking.

"I'm sorry," Draco breathes, and he is close enough that his words ghost through her long hair like gentle wind. "You're beautiful, you know."

She cocks her head to one side. "I missed you."

"You didn't write back," he says, and finds there is no anger or accusation in it, only a resigned sort of hope. Hope for what? Hope that she regrets it? Hope that she will stay? Hope that she will love him?

"I didn't know what to say," she says. "I didn't know how to – we were never supposed to be like this, Draco. This isn't how it was supposed to go."

"I know," he whispers, "but it has, and we are." He does not reach to take the flowers.

"Well, now what?" she asks, with only the echo of laughter in her voice.

"Now..." he says, and closes the distance between them, all the years and the feuds and the pain and the centimetres that separate her lips and his, and her kiss is the sweetest thing he has ever known. His hands wind up in the ends of her long red hair, and hers are still clasping the lilies between them so that they are crushed between their chests, and Draco thinks he could cry but he won't because she is kissing him back and he thinks he might love her more than anything.

"I see," she says, when his lips have fallen from hers and their breath is coming in slight gasps, and he chuckles against her cheek.

"No, you don't," and she laughs into his open mouth again and he has forgotten the faux mourners and the watchful eyes and the only thing that matters is that Ginny Weasley is here and she's _his._

* * *

They place the slightly crumpled lilies on the fresh dirt of his mother's grave, and Ginny says, "Tell me what you see."

He looks around at the graveyard and it's stone and grey and grief, and he says, "You."

And that is enough.


End file.
